A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.

Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man in spite of yourself.

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

To most readers the word 'fiction' is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author's part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it.